All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🛰️ AWS has made AWS Cloud WAN available in AWS GovCloud (US-West) and AWS GovCloud (US-East) as of Oct 1, 2025. The service provides a central dashboard and policy-driven networking to create a global network that spans VPCs, Transit Gateways, and on-premises locations. It supports BGP-based global route exchange and connectivity via Site-to-Site VPN, Direct Connect, or third-party SD-WAN solutions. The dashboard offers consolidated visibility into network health, security, and performance to simplify operations.

🔍 CISOs increasingly face a torrent of vendor pitches and must probe beyond marketing to find tools that genuinely improve security. Experienced security leaders recommend five core questions about business fit, operational impact, integration and maintenance, update cadence, and concrete use cases. They emphasize live demos and practitioner testing so teams can spot technical gaps and avoid products that merely add noise. Be wary of vague claims, fearmongering, buzzword-heavy pitches, or vendors who resist feedback.

🛡️ Amazon SageMaker managed MLflow is now available in both AWS GovCloud (US-West) and AWS GovCloud (US-East) regions. The managed service integrates MLflow experiment tracking with SageMaker capabilities, streamlining AI experimentation and accelerating GenAI development from idea to production. It provides end-to-end observability to help reduce time-to-market and simplify compliance and operational oversight for government workloads.

ℹ️ Windows 11 25H2 (2025 Update) is now generally available. The minor release shares the same platform as 24H2 and is rolled out gradually, with devices on 24H2 updated via small enablement packages (<200 KB) while systems on 23H2 receive a full OS swap. Enterprise-focused changes include Wi‑Fi 7 support, improved vulnerability detection, and an optional Group Policy to remove select preinstalled Store apps. Microsoft also removed legacy tools such as PowerShell 2.0 and WMIC.

📈 Amazon has expanded the CloudWatch and OpenSearch Service integrated analytics experience to five additional commercial regions: Asia Pacific (Osaka and Seoul), Europe (Milan and Spain), and US West (N. California). CloudWatch Logs customers can now query logs with SQL or OpenSearch PPL in addition to CloudWatch Logs Insights QL, including JOINs, subqueries, and rich JSON, mathematical, datetime and string functions. With a few clicks, users can create OpenSearch dashboards for VPC, WAF, and CloudTrail logs and analyze data in-place without copying logs or building ETL pipelines.

🔌 AWS expanded 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps Direct Connect dedicated connections with MACsec encryption at the Equinix BG1 data center near Bogota, Colombia. Customers can now provision private, direct network access from this location to all public AWS Regions (except China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones. The enhancement delivers more consistent, lower-latency and encrypted connectivity for enterprises and partners in the region.

🔌 AWS has opened a new AWS Direct Connect location at the Digital Realty MAD3 data center near Madrid, Spain. The site provides dedicated 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps connections with optional MACsec encryption and enables private network access to all public AWS Regions (except China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones. This is the third Direct Connect site in Madrid and the fourth in Spain, offering a lower-variance networking option compared with the public internet. It joins more than 146 Direct Connect locations worldwide, expanding options for colocations and hybrid deployments.

🔎 Google added two BigQuery tools—ask_data_insights and BigQuery Forecast—to the MCP Toolbox and the Agent Development Kit (ADK) to enable conversational analytics and time-series predictions for agents. ask_data_insights uses the Conversational Analytics API to interpret plain-English questions, generate and run queries, and return summarised answers with a step‑by‑step log for transparency. BigQuery Forecast leverages BigQuery ML’s TimesFM model via AI.FORECAST so agents can run forecasting jobs directly inside BigQuery without separate ML infrastructure.

🧩 Deploy Payload to Cloudflare Workers in one click with a template that provisions D1 and R2 bindings. The Payload team ported the project to OpenNext and implemented custom adapters: a Drizzle-based adapter that maps D1 results for SQLite compatibility and an R2 storage adapter that uses bindings to avoid token management. They used Wrangler remote bindings for migrations and applied Hyperdrive and D1 read replicas to cut latency and improve global read performance.

🌐 Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) now supports IPv6 for API requests in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, giving customers the option to use IPv6 or IPv4 over dual‑stack public and VPC endpoints. The new endpoints are validated under FIPS 140-3, and SNS now supports IPv6 across all AWS Regions where the service is available.

🛡️ Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) now supports additional FIPS 140-3 validated endpoints across several AWS Regions in the United States and Canada. These FIPS-compliant endpoints allow organizations, including federal contractors, to meet requirements to use validated cryptographic modules when encrypting sensitive data. The new endpoints support requests over dual-stack public and VPC endpoints and are available in US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (N. California and Oregon), Canada (Central and Calgary) and AWS GovCloud (US). Customers can use these endpoints to run SNS workloads that require FIPS 140-3 validated cryptography within the listed regions.

🔐 Growing SMEs face rising security complexity and must choose between building internal XDR capabilities or outsourcing to managed MXDR services. The article contrasts Kaspersky Next XDR Optimum for teams aiming to develop in-house expertise with Kaspersky Next MXDR Optimum for organizations prioritizing 24/7 monitoring and lower operational overhead. It highlights key XDR features—sandboxing, Active Directory integration, robust investigation tools and security-awareness integration—and explains how managed services can both provide immediate protection and accelerate staff training.

🔁 AWS Transform for VMware now generates reusable Terraform modules from discovered VMware network definitions, complementing existing AWS CloudFormation and CDK outputs. The feature converts source network configurations into modular, customizable infrastructure code that fits into current deployment pipelines. It is available in all Regions where the service is offered and helps teams preserve operational consistency during migrations. By producing Terraform modules, the service enables reuse of Terraform-based workflows, reduces manual configuration effort, and supports teams that prefer Terraform for network automation.

🔒 VMware certifications are rising as IT teams confront hybrid, multi-cloud, and security complexity. Sponsored by VMUG, the article argues that certification has shifted from a resume boost to an operational requirement that helps reduce misconfiguration-driven breaches and embed security best practices. It highlights measurable financial value per certified employee, the role of VMUG Advantage in providing exam discounts and study resources, and how certifications support hiring, onboarding, and career resiliency.

🔒 AWS announces that AWS Firewall Manager is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region. The service enables cloud security administrators and site reliability engineers to centrally create, deploy, and maintain defense-in-depth security policies across accounts, including AWS WAF protections and managed rule sets. By centralizing policy management, teams can reduce manual configuration, ensure consistent enforcement, and lower operational overhead. Customers should consult the documentation and region table for full feature and pricing details.

🚀Today AWS announced that Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) is available in all availability zones in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) and Europe (London) Regions. Amazon EVS runs VMware Cloud Foundation directly within your Amazon VPC on EC2 bare-metal instances powered by AWS Nitro. You can deploy a complete VCF environment in hours using the guided configuration workflow or the AWS CLI with automated deployment, enabling faster migrations, lower latency for end users, and improved compliance and resiliency.

📣 AWS announces general availability of AWS Service Quotas integration with AWS Step Functions, allowing customers to view account-level quota values in the Service Quotas console and monitor utilization with Amazon CloudWatch metrics. Users can request quota increases directly from the console, and eligible changes are applied automatically to reduce manual intervention. The feature is available in all commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions where Step Functions is provided and can be accessed via the console or CLI.

🔒 AWS has added four service-specific IAM condition keys for AWS Transfer Family, enabling administrators to write more granular policies and SCPs. These keys let you constrain server protocols, endpoint types, and storage domains at request time. For example, use transfer:RequestServerEndpointType to block public servers or transfer:RequestServerProtocols to allow only SFTP. The keys are available in all Regions where the service is offered.

🔒 AWS Storage Gateway now supports VPC endpoint policies, allowing administrators to attach fine‑grained endpoint policies to VPC endpoints that control access to Storage Gateway direct APIs. Administrators can scope access by principal, action, and resource to reduce attack surface and enforce data protection controls. The capability is available in all Regions where Storage Gateway operates; review endpoint policies to align with your security and compliance requirements.

🔒 Customers can now attach boot and data volumes backed by Dell PowerStore and HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 arrays to Amazon EC2 instances on AWS Outposts, with support for authenticated and encrypted volumes. This extends external block volume support alongside NetApp and Pure Storage, enabling use of on‑premises enterprise arrays for OS boot volumes and high‑performance data volumes. AWS provides automation scripts via AWS Samples and access through the Console or CLI; third‑party integration is available on Outposts 2U servers and racks at no additional charge.